Riding on motorcycles, with other boys

It hadn’t begun well. My lack of preparedness gnawed at me. Played tricks with the back of my head.

“I had been ill-informed and therefore, I was underprepared,” I told myself again and again, until a dark, grey thundercloud — ugly and malevolent, ready to lash out at everybody — lodged itself inside my head.

By day three, I was talking to my motorcycle. The only person who seemed willing to listen.

Fortunately, so far, the weather had held. It hadn’t rained. If it did, I told myself, I would be genuinely miserable.

At the end of day three, in Kalpa, Himachal Pradesh, it took a rationed swig of rum to calm me down. As I carped to a mechanic (“My rear brakes aren’t working, can you not tell?”) and to our second lead rider (“How was I supposed to get the riding gear needed for a trip like this together in two days? Couldn’t you have loaned it to me?), Miles, from Chennai, offered me a drink of rum from a bottle of coke.

I thanked him and went back to jostling with Chacha (the mechanic) and Akash (the second lead rider), getting louder and louder as the rum fed my fears of persecution.

Why was nobody looking out for me?

Miles asked whether I would like a refill?

“Yes please.”

“Alright,” he said, “but only if you don’t get aggressive with Akash.”

The next morning I fell off my motorcycle. The rear brake stopped working on a stretch of gravel road and I stopped only after I had run over a mound of stones and crashed into another. “I cannot believe this is happening to me,” I remember thinking, after which Chacha came and tightened my brakes.

Things got worse after lunch. As we began our descent from Lachungla pass, my heart very quickly made its way into my mouth. The road was narrow, carved high up into the mountainside, a wall of rock to the right and a 5,000-metre drop to the left. I clung to the rock face, riding excruciatingly slowly, certain that I was going to die on day four of the Royal Enfield Himalayan Odyssey, Delhi to Khardung La, the highest motorable road in the world, and back to Delhi. That I would make a mistake, that my brakes would fail me again, that I was a frightened man who like all little boys dreams about making the folkloric motorcycle journey from Delhi to Leh but that I was not cut out for it.

Later, Ajay, a copywriter from Mumbai, put it more succinctly. “Dude,” he said, “my balls were in my mouth.”

When Santhosh, our lead rider, honked behind me, asking to overtake, I waved him on past my left. I was not going to leave the sanctuary my rock face afforded me, which had Santhosh squawking like an angry bird at the next morning’s briefing that that did not constitute motorcycle riding. “You ride on the left in India,” he reminded us. “People overtake you from the right.”

But before that, that night I had a rum-fuelled nightmare. I had fallen off the road and was perched atop a small outcrop of rock, my back pressed against the cliff, the ground a thousand metres below me. There was little chance of rescue. Our contingent of 60 riders, three mechanics, and one doctor did not include a mountaineer. All I could do was stand as still as possible and hope the wind would not blow me off my ledge. The soles of my feet began to sweat.

I woke up clutching the edges of my bed and the next morning the doctor told me my BP had shot up to a 150/100, and that from now on rum would not be allowed to assuage my fears.

At least it hadn’t rained, I told myself as I looked out of my window at another clear blue morning sky. I thanked god again, as I had been doing the past few days. “Thank you for not making it rain,” I told him. “I owe you one.”

The next afternoon, after a particularly arduous water crossing, my rear brake went missing again. I hit a stone and my motorcycle fell over my right leg. I lay under her for a few minutes, unable to lift her off me, grateful that the hot silencer was not pressing down on me. Lying there, I promised myself that I would do better than this. I was familiar with Enfields, I rode one back home. I liked doing that. Then I wriggled out from under my motorcycle and walked off the slight throbbing I could feel in the second toe of my right foot.

Then, it began to rain. Not a torrential downpour luckily, but enough for everybody to put on their rain suits. And for me to curse the sardarji who’d sold me a rain suit near Kalpa because when I put one large boot into a trouser leg, the suit tore.

The first fellow rider I met was Miles at a dhaba about a mile ahead. He offered me tea. “I want to thank you,” I told him, “for helping me calm down the other day. And now that it is raining, I have nothing left to complain about.”

The road to Leh

All I wanted after that was to get to our next stop; to shelter, a hot shower, a warm meal and a comfortable bed.

As I gunned my engine towards that destination, my peripheral vision began to blur over. Suddenly, I couldn’t see the thousand-metre drop any longer or the stark, pretty landscape on either side of the road. The green meadows with the sheep grazing on them. Or the snow-capped mountains beyond them.

But the road, miraculously, seemed to become wider. I moved to the left, not needing the safety of my rock face any longer. The pointers given to us at our daily morning briefings came back to me, one by one.

Look at where you want to go, for that is where your motorcycle will go.

Grip the fuel tank with your thighs and hold the handlebar loosely, with your elbows bent. The front wheel auto-corrects itself. Every time the wheel is pushed to the left, it will auto-correct to the right but not if you’re holding tightly onto your handlebar.

Throttle down as you go into a turn, throttle up as you come out of it.

Use both your brakes, together, in gentle squeezes. Locking your wheels will get you into trouble.

And finally, I understood. This is why motorcyclists do what they do. You know, those mad men you see on television, twenty or thirty of them racing around a mud track, all of them frighteningly close to each other. So close that sometimes you think one of them must land on another’s head. And as you watch this madness, you ask yourself: Why are they doing this? Have they no fear of speed? Do they not understand that they could get hurt?

The answer is no, because these men are in supreme control of their machines. They understand them, they know what their motorcycles will do, how they will react to their commands.

And so quietly, in my head, so nobody would hear, I began to talk to my motorcycle again. “Let’s go home,” I told her.

(The author rode from Delhi to Leh, via the Spiti valley in Himachal, last year in June; he escaped with only one broken toe in his right foot. The Himalayan Odyssey this year will begin on June 22)

DISCLAIMER : Views expressed above are the author's own.

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Parakram Rautela is an assistant editor with The Sunday Times of India. What he likes most is being out in the field, or the fields, getting his stories from the people, first-hand. Without that foot-slogging, he says, you will never completely understand an, or any, issue.

Parakram Rautela is an assistant editor with The Sunday Times of India. What he likes most is being out in the field, or the fields, getting his stories fro. . .